by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Fight Club, or Community of Life?
Truly, Sister Beth Johnson is a radical and a heretic.
Not in the terms that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reckons such things, but in the terms of public debate about human beings and our position in the natural world, or nature.
This debate took place over the weekend via inadvertent juxtaposition in the Sunday Review section of the Times. On the left (page) there was a batch of letters responding to MIT physicist and author Alan Lightman’s article about the different ways people make sense of nature as it delivers phenomena like the recent mudslide in Washington or the tornadoes in the South and Midwest. On the right (page) there was Maureen Dowd urging Pope Francis to stick up for Prof. Johnson in the face of reprimands from the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation of the Faith, which has seen her book Quest for the Living God as deviating from central Catholic teachings about the nature of God and creation.
Historically, MIT’s Lightman explains, we have understood our place in nature by attributing purpose or agency to nature – purpose or agency generally seen as akin to human nature and agency:
So close to nature are we in some mythologies that human beings are regularly transformed into other animals and even inanimate matter. In Aztec mythology, the twin volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl were once human lovers, later turned into mountains by the gods.
In the other direction, nature is constantly given human qualities. Wordsworth wrote that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” Mother Nature has comforted us in every culture on earth. In the 20th and 21st centuries, some environmentalists claimed that the entire earth is a single ecosystem, a “superorganism” in the language of Gaia.
Here as elsewhere — say, in his book The Accidental Universe — Lightman distinguishes himself through his temperate but thoroughgoing rejection of such ideas:
I would argue that we have been fooling ourselves. Nature, in fact, is mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor benevolent.
Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
Lightman’s position is essentially the default position among people of science, and, more and more, among people in the humanities and the arts.
Johnson’s position couldn’t be more different. Working from the Christian tradition rooted in biblical texts considered inspired – in a new book, notably the book of Job – she proposes that nature, including humanity, is a “community of life” created and sustained by a living God:
If you interrogate the flora and fauna of land, air, and sea, the text [of Job] suggests, their response will lead your mind and heart to the living God, generous source and sustaining power of their life. In their beauty, their variety, their interacting, their coming to be and passing away, they witness to the overflowing goodness of their Creator. They even teach something about human beings, that these members of the community of life also receive their every breath as a gift from the same immensely immeasurable Giver of life.
Dowd and other defenders of Prof. Johnson’s right to do theology in the way she sees fit don’t take up her work in its own right or consider whether there is merit to the CDF’s challenges. Whether or not there is, the real argument going on in our society is between those who see creation as “created” and those who see it as something that “simply is.” The argument is already well advanced, and already Johnson’s effusive account of the createdness and purposeful interdependence of nature is uncommon, even deviant.
Lightman was a panelist at a Georgetown-Vatican conference last month; here’s hoping we can find a way bring him and Johnson into the same room to discuss their ideas face to face.
